Site Mobile Navigation

For Some Gays, a Right They Can Forsake

Past and present Some gay activists bemoan the political and cultural shift from the sexually liberated 1970s to todays push for marriage.Credit
Left, LGBT Community Center, National History Archive; right, Janet L. Mathews/The Columbian via Associated Press

WHEN Bill Dobbs sees the heartwarming photographs of gay couples cuddling, grinning and holding dogs and children, accompanied by pious remarks about how many years they have been a couple — “five years,” “eight years,” “24 years!” — in news releases and newspaper and television reports about the fight for gay marriage, it turns his stomach.

Mr. Dobbs’s reaction is, he admits, probably not that different from the one he imagines that the anti-gay forces feel. But Mr. Dobbs is gay, part of an intense strain of gay activists who have fought against the idea of gay marriage from the beginning and who think that the escalating pursuit of it is a mistake, especially in light of legal setbacks like the decision on Wednesday by the Washington Supreme Court that lawmakers may restrict marriage to a man and a woman.

To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention. He said that he does, however, support civil unions for all as a replacement for civil marriage.

“For those of us who are single, there is this constant drumbeat,” said Mr. Dobbs, who went to college during the last years of the Vietnam War and became a crusader for gay and antiwar causes. “You must be coupled to be really fulfilled, for us to treat you as a full person.”

For better or for worse, to be unattached and gay is not what it used to be. Gone are the guilt-free days of free love in the clubs, of hooking up at bathhouses and reveling in promiscuity, which Mr. Dobbs prefers to call “sexual generosity.” In are elaborate weddings, shared property, pets and children.

Mr. Dobbs said that even on Fire Island, where cohabitating with 12 other men was once a time-honored tradition, a friend who is an utterly bourgeois gay homeowner complains that he gets the gimlet eye from gay and lesbian parents because he is not in a relationship. Another friend scolded Mr. Dobbs that if he had never wanted to marry, there must be something wrong with him.

But as the fight for same-sex marriage rages across the country — this month being defeated in the highest court in New York State as well as Washington — the anti-marriage gay men and lesbians say they are feeling emboldened to speak out against what they view as the hijacking of gay civil rights by a distressingly conservative, politically correct part of the gay establishment. They say the gay marriage movement, backed by major well-funded organizations like Lambda Legal, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has drained resources and psychic energy from other causes like AIDS research, universal health insurance and poverty among gay people.

The dissenters have been around since the early 1990’s, when the idea of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was introduced in Hawaii, especially among gays and lesbians who came out of the activist tradition of the 1960’s, and in academic settings. But they say they have muffled their voices by censoring themselves.

“I think the discussion was foreclosed because nobody wanted to speak up against our brothers and sisters,” who wanted marriage, said Jim Eigo, editor of two gay sex magazines, Playguy and Inches. “These are people they’ve worked with, people they knew they would hurt.”

But he and others in the opposition say they increasingly feel that they have nothing to lose given that “there has been political defeat after political defeat” for the gay marriage lobby, while Massachusetts remains the only state that has legalized same-sex marriage and voters in dozens of other states have passed “defense of marriage” acts.

They question whether monogamy is normal. They wonder why gay men and lesbians are buying into an institution that they see as rooted in oppression. They worry that adapting to conventional “family values” will destroy the cohesion that has made gay men and lesbians a force to be reckoned with, politically and culturally.

Photo

THE OPPOSITION Bill Dobbs, a gay activist, says the drive for same-sex marriage distracts from other important issues.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

In the 70’s, many gay people saw themselves as “an army of lovers,” to borrow the title of a German documentary of the time, Mr. Eigo said. “I still hold the candle for a gay community like that, in which every man is linked to every other by at least the potential of being his lover.”

Opposition among gay people to same-sex marriage enrages and frustrates its defenders, like Evan Wolfson, a lawyer who was co-counsel in the Hawaii marriage case and is now the executive director of Freedom to Marry.

“My organization is called ‘Freedom to Marry’ not ‘Mandatory Marriage,’ ” Mr. Wolfson said. “Gay people in America can’t really say they’ve rejected marriage in favor of something else, because for most of us it hasn’t been offered.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

He says that states like Vermont and California would not have adopted civil unions or domestic partnership rights if the pressure of marriage litigation had not raised awareness of the need for social validation of committed gay relationships.

Yet dissenters like Sarah Schulman, a playwright, novelist and English professor at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, see a more subtle form of regression coming out of the movement, a return to the values of the 1950’s. As a teacher, she said, she sees a lot of younger gay people, especially women adopting the heterosexual fantasy that even Barbie has distanced herself from — “that someday they will meet the right person and they will get married and they will have children.” She fears that lesbian mothers are embracing a “poverty model” and taking themselves out of the running to be the next George Sand or Emma Goldman.

Some gay activists who are critical of the marriage movement also see it as part of the fallout from the AIDS epidemic, which quashed the sexually liberated lifestyle of gay men as they tried to fight the perception that they were promiscuous carriers of a plague by becoming more like everybody else.

And some see the insistence on defining homosexuality as strictly a matter of biology — rather than a matter of choice and sensibility as well as biology — as part of the same conformist impulse.

Rob Klengler, a businessman in Marblemount, Wash., is troubled by the focus on what is normal in sex or domestic life. “I don’t know if I would use the term ‘normal’ or not,” he said. “To me, it’s a simple choice. To me it’s a choice like whether I eat red meat. I like chocolate versus vanilla ice cream. It’s just a choice.”

Other groups, while supporting gay marriage, are using the issue to push for legal recognition of other nontraditional relationships, like unmarried couples of all kinds.

Minutes after the Washington state court ruled on Wednesday, some 250 academics, celebrities, writers and others, including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine, Armistead Maupin, Terrence McNally, Holly Near and Cornel West, signed a manifesto called “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” It calls for the legal rights and privileges of marriage to be extended to arrangements like extended families living under one roof, and close friends in long-term caregiving relationships.

“We hope to move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics as they exist in the United States today,” reads the document, which was organized and written by academics and activists including Joseph DeFilippis, executive director of Queers for Economic Justice.

Then there are those gay men who find themselves embracing marriage in spite of their iconoclastic temperament. Florent Morellet, the French-born owner of Restaurant Florent in the once-raunchy meatpacking district of Manhattan, had a commitment ceremony in 1988 with his partner, Daniel Platten. Mr. Platten died in 1994 and Mr. Morellet says he is at a stage in his life when he is looking for a monogamous relationship.

Yet, influenced by French attitudes toward erotic life, he does not subscribe to the American ideal of marriage as a narrowing of sexual opportunity. “In France, which is nominally a Catholic country, adultery is actually an equal opportunity,” he says. “Women have almost as much adultery relationships as men.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST2 of the New York edition with the headline: For Some Gays, a Right They Can Forsake. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe